By Russell Cole

This essay is a response to John Browne’s article, Socialism is Coming Back to Haunt the US, published by the Populist Party of America, (www.populistamerica.com).

This argument has some interesting points. However, the crux of the argument appears to rest entirely upon the validity of the proposition, entitlements were the cause of the decline of US manufacturing. This is a prodigious claim that the author fails to support with any empirical, or, for that matter, speculative armchair theoretical justifications. In fact, it is presented as though it is a truism.

I suppose he is claiming that the welfare state, somehow, precipitated the moral decay of the American population, which resulted in the collapse of American manufacturing. Nevertheless, even if we are to entertain the remote possibility that appendages to Social Security led to a kind of popular moral demise, I fail to recognize any clear, compelling association between this alleged moral degeneration and the deindustrialization of America.

I would compare the claim made by Browne to something resembling the following: A South Asian Indian woman with leprosy prayed to an idol representing Mother Teresa. In subsequent events, the Indian woman’s disease subsided. Therefore, Mother Teresa performed a miracle. This kind of explanation is, of course, satisfactory for the Catholic Church. It had political motivations for ensuring that Mother Teresa, the good work that she performed, and the positive and reverent emotions that her identity connoted for so many people would be associated with the Church and an extension of it. Taking over the symbology attributable to heroes among the people is a necessary form of imperialism for an institution that claims to possess a monopoly on human religiosity.

If anything has contributed to the decline of American manufacturing, it has been the freer market fundamentalism that has been dogmatically adhered to in all instances of foreign policy deliberations involving economic trade; a Laissez-faire fanaticism that has been embraced by Washington wise men since the end of the Second World War.

We were told that the increased productivity that is fostered through the exploitation of cheaper, foreign labor markets would free capital allowing for reinvestment in the US economy. This injection of capital into the US economy would, in turn, create higher paying, higher-skilled occupations for the American workforce.

This all, of course, was based upon the assumption that the corporations, which were increasingly becoming multi-national - due to the fact that they were no longer geographical constrained; a transformation propelled by trade policy as well as technological advancements in communications and distributions - would actually reinvest in the American economy.

Unfortunately, what the freer trade group-think failed to foresee was that these now global corporations could simply reinvested in the same foreign economies while continuing to target the American consumer market, because the implementation of freer trade policies had dismantled the necessary tariffs and other protectionist measures needed to create an incentive for corporations to base their manufacturing inside the United States.The argument made by this author appears to be a last desperate attempt to vindicate the policies responsible for the very state of the US economy that the author, ironically, decries.

Tags: economics, freer trade policy, manufacturing, offshoring, Russell Coles Blog, welfare state
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By Russell Cole

After reading the opinion piece by Rev. Marty Fields, entitled “Religion and Culture: Democrats and the ‘God gap’ (http://www.leadercall.com/),” I feel the need to bring attention to the fact that his assessment of Democratic Party failures in the South indicates a profound ignorance of the historical realities underlying the Republican rise to Southern political dominance, during the final decades of the 20th Century.

Rev. Fields suggests that it is religion that has alienated the American South from the platform of the Democratic Party. Historically, nothing could be further from the truth. The South had remained, to a large extent, in support of the Democratic Party even through the Kennedy Administration. Kennedy, of course, had campaigned as a secularist; a political strategy that was necessary at the time, due to America’s traditional apprehension of Catholicism, which Americans had interpreted to be at odds with values undergirding democracy.

The South became estranged from the Democratic Party following Johnson signing into law the civil rights legislation in the 1960s. It was at this pivotal movement that the New Deal coalition was broken; a system of alliances that was based upon shared class interests. Therefore, it was not religion that alienated the South from the Democratic Party; rather, it was white supremacy and the Democratic renunciation of it – a transformative speech act performed by Johnson – that disaffected Southern Whites from the Democratic Party.

Concurrently, the Republican Party, which had been a minority party for decades, seized upon the opportunity and adjusted its political rhetoric in order to appeal to Southern Whites. Goldwater, for instance, made the famous decision not to attempt to court African American voters. Reagan, when winning the Presidency, deployed the same tactic as Goldwater; only, Reagan went further in his attempt to appeal to Whites in the South. If you recall Reagan’s famous description of the “Cadillac driving welfare queen,” who apparently was going from welfare office to welfare office picking up checks, it is evident that Reagan was willing to go as far as possible – without using altogether explicit racial epitaphs – to appeal to the Jim Crow culture of the South.

Of course, there was no such thing as the mythic “Welfare Queen,” who drove “a Cadillac.” However, that is not the point. It was an encoded communication. White collar Northerners took the statement at face value. For them, Reagan’s complaint identified a convenient rationale to detest a progressive taxation system. After all, why should one have to pay taxes when the money is merely fueling corruption? For Southern Whites, however, the statement took on different significations. Reagan had designed his rhetoric to express a sympathetic commitment to Southern Whites, who felt resentment toward the Federal Government for forcibly contravening Southern provincial social practices when dismantling Jim Crow institutions.

If we analyze Reagan’s statement – keeping in mind that the expression can take on various semantic qualities, depending upon whom it is delivered – then the words are interpretable to mean something altogether different for Southern Whites. Obviously, “Cadillac,” and “Queen,” connoted “Black American.” The use of the word, “Welfare,” was a ploy to invoke an association with “Government.” To extrapolate, then, Reagan was translating his platform theme, consisting of the diminution of government, into terms that would resonate among Southern Whites. Reagan’s denunciation of welfare fraud was actually an indication that he would defer to States’ Rights, as opposed to federally intervening in order to ensure citizenship – along with its entailing privileges – for African Americans.

This was a brilliant rhetorical maneuver. It was designed to synergize the racial animosity of White Southerners with the underlying agenda that Reagan had in mind: The dismantling of the extensions of the welfare state, which was created by the New Deal and the Great Society. This governing principle – what amounted to a Neoliberal reform agenda – was at odds with the economic interests of Southerners. However, through his rhetoric, Reagan effectively presented his platform policies in a manner in which they failed to invoke economic apprehensions by Southern Whites; instead, inciting long held racial animosities toward African Americans, in addition to a contempt toward what was perceived as Northern intrusiveness.

Therefore, for people such as Rev. Fields to insist that it was religion that drove the South from the Democratic Party is self-delusional. It is time for Southerners to come to terms with their history. It might be unpleasant, but it will help to vanquish all of the obfuscation, clearing the way for informed and rational decision-making when planning for the future.

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Dear Editor,

This letter is in response to an article, “IS SECULARISM THE END OF LIBERALISM? REFLECTIONS ON EUROPE’S DEMOGRAPHIC DECLINE DRAWING ON POPE BENEDICT, HABERMAS, NIETZSCHE AND STRAUSS,” that was authored by Gary D. Glenn and published by The Catholic Social Science Review.

The author of this article repeatedly implies that democracy - its values and practices, including its individualism - are values that are grounded in the Christian tradition. Whether cognizant of Christian doctrine or not, Europeans continue to incorporate Christianity into their ethical constructions. As a consequence, secularist Europeans have not resorted to what the author refers to as a Nietzschean depravity, where the strong can abuse the weak with impunity.

Leaving aside Professor Glenn’s altogether vulgar interpretation of Nietzsche, who was not interested in effecting a ruthless, violent social condition - but, rather, a state where man was not captive to the self-loathing, persistently self-doubting Christian ethic, which is tantamount to a slave morality - ??the educated reader of this article surely takes umbrage to the Pope’s claim, as reported by Glenn, that Christianity is the incubator of democracy and egalitarianism.

The problems with such an assertion are so abundant that it would be exhaustive to enumerate all of them.?? However, one contrast that is apparently striking is the social structure assumed by the Roman Catholic Church, itself. The hierarchical structure of the Church seems to be expressed by the positions it takes in respect to Human Rights. Keep in mind that liberationist Theology was condemned by the Catholic Church, who saw the movement as political, not religious. Such an unholy Holy position on the part of the Catholic establishment is right in line with the proverb, “Turn the other cheek:” an expression that is demonstrative of Catholicism’s lack of concern for social injustice.

On a final note, I take exception to the thinly veiled racism expressed in this article. The author suggests that Muslims and their religion of Islam is lacking in the qualities necessary to sustain democratic traditions in Western Europe. In response to this bigotry, I would add that Christianity, which has nothing to do with democracy, was successfully overcome by Enlightenment thinkers, who conceived of many of the intellectual tenets that would be integrated into the democratic ideology. As a final note, the Enlightenment entailed the rejection of the prejudices and superstitions propagated by Christianity. The only connection between Christianity and the Enlightenment was the Enlightenment’s rejection of Christianity.

Best Regards,

Russell Cole

Tags: democracy, religion, Russell Coles Blog
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By R Cole

The Green Party

In this chapter, I render the organizational practices of the Green Party of Illinois. Not from the perspective of organizational theory, but from the perspective of culture and its manifestation in organizational praxes. I attempt to construct a Green cosmology, into which I situate the group’s practices when contextualizing them, in order to make them intelligible to an onlooker.

The Green Party US, according to its own account of its historicity, was formed into a national political party in 1996, (Green Party US 2004 Party Platform). It was originally compiled from a convergence of state green parties that had existed, previously, in a state independent from one another without any overarching national organization through which they could coordinate their projects and advocacies. As well as consolidating state green parties, the National Green Party affiliated itself, loosely, with other National Green Parties that had developed around the world; perhaps, most prominently in Germany.

The Illinois Green Party, in which most of my observations took place, possessed no such formal history; at least at the time of my participatory observations. Verbal accounts were generally constructed according to the following narrative dimensions: The State Party had existed in some nominal form, preceding the Nader Campaign of 2000, after which Green political operatives, who were originally exogenous to the State, capitalized off of Nader’s popularity. They infiltrated the Party and organized its locals. These interventions led to the establishment of the Illinois Green Party’s in its modern form.

In the following ethnographic accounts, I inner-disperse analysis. I generally make the case that the Green worldview is immured in the same premises and implicit assumptions that structure other American political forms. These commonalities result in the same methodological prescriptions for political praxis. Therefore, to significant degree, the Greens conform to the system that they are consciously working to alter.

This is not to say that the Greens do not possess an agenda that deviates from other political agencies. However, such differences in politics are constructed upon ideological consistencies that overwhelm the differences, eventually rendering them inconsequential.

By largely conforming to the processes of the political system that they seek to change, the Greens are disposed to become the very political structure that they reflexively center upon as the target demanding interdiction in order to engender its alteration.

Green Party: literature and practice

If one peruses the literature that has been rendered public by the Green Party over the years, he or she will find enunciations of radical democratic sentiments. The internal organization of the Party, according to the literature, is intended to be radically democratized.

When arriving at a policy affecting the Party, the primary vehicle for the policy adoption was a consensus-building dialog, in which all members of the organization were encouraged to participate. If a consensus could not be reached, there were procedures that would close the debate in order for there to be a referendum.

If one is to reflect shortly upon the descriptions above, he or she will conclude that the decision-making processes, internal to Green organizations, embodied a bottom-to-top form of legitimization, resulting in the adoption of various policies.

Accordingly, the most powerful and impacting segment of the organization was intended to be the general, undifferentiated membership; not an elected chair or an appointed steering committee. The Greens not only publicly articulated polemics in favor of grass-roots democracy; they assumed such a political organization in their own internal deliberations.

Or, at least, this is what the literature suggested.

To understand expressions that reference political values requires their translation into the form they take on in their concretion: what amounts to their operational definitions. Or else, one might fail to interpret their semantic attributions in a mode that reflects the meanings with which they are endowed by the people that use them. Therefore, when coming to understand the Green Party and its expression of values, it is best to approach the endeavor by relying upon empirical observations encapsulating the manifestation of such values in concrete practices.

In the State Party in which I primarily based my participation, according to the Bylaw structure of the organization, the Membership was the ultimate power: the first and final voice in the decision-making conducted by the Party. It was only following an attempt to arrive at consensus – through dialogic activities that included the Membership of the Party – that other mechanisms would be utilized, such as the closure of debate in order to vote on the measure that had been the subject of deliberation.

(Since, at the time, I understood my own ethnographic project as something that was primarily geared toward organizational theory; I finagled my way into the chair of the bylaws committee. This position wielded little power, and it only required that the Executive Committee ratify the nominee who would become its incumbent. Therefore, it was not an officer position within the organizational schema of the Party.

I soon realized that my interpretations of the literature, including the bylaws, was divorced from Party praxes. As I go into in latter contents, radical democracy has been co-opted by a managerial class that dominates the Party affairs).

Similar statements have been publicly rendered in reflections concerning the American governing structure. In both cases, the significations of such assertions can be misestimated if one does not look to concrete praxes.

There are innumerable institutions that arbitrate between the citizens and the policies of the State. Although democratic decision-making has not be entirely hijacked by these institutions populating both polity and civil society, it has been constricted and appropriated in a way the limits its possibilities: electoral choices that have been preselected by what are largely extra-democratic institutions; i.e., the candidates we are presented on ballots are the product of processes that are enacted by the 2 Parties that monopolize American politics.

When I originally entered the Party, following a period of time when I had volunteered for the Kerry Campaign, the internal practices of the State Green Party failed to exhibit the behaviors and rituals that one would associate with a grass-roots democratic organization. Rather, the Party had acquired a structure that allocated much of the decision-making authority to different committees that were charged with performing various functions for the Party.

Furthermore, there were elected officials, who held offices in the State Green Party. These capacities were, of course, available to any member of the Party, who could win an inner-party election. However, more times than not, the positions belonged to individuals who could be described as party bosses. This is not to say that they manipulated Party processes in order to maintain power. Rather, their continuation as leaders within the Party appeared to be more the product of apathy and deficits in confidence possessed by the rank and file members of the association.

Therefore, it would not be justified to assert that the grass-roots democracy that had been alluded to in Party literature was necessarily corrupted and thwarted by a faction that desired to assume and persist as an elite ruling class. In fact, it is difficult for me to assuredly proffer the assertion that there was, at an earlier time, a collection of Green organizations that were, in fact, practitioners of grass-roots democracy.

When working as a participant in the State Party that I had infiltrated, I felt a tension – and this was my reaction, not necessarily shared by others – between deontology and pragmatics. This was a situation in which it seemed more practicable, efficient to have a group of elites making decisions, who could move the organization in beneficial directions.

This is not to say that these party bosses were of an intellectual temperament necessary to conceive the types of plans that would lead to Party success. In fact, it is my opinion that they were not.

The unannounced leader of the State Party was certainly schooled in the art of party politics. He even had sufficient experience sitting on committees in the National Organization for him to articulate bylaw modifications in legislator-speak: a combination of boilerplate with specificities; each instance of which is designed to prevent against all the ambiguity-scenarios that had been institutionalized in the dialect of legislator-speak.

To the point, he operated according to a philosophy that things had to be done, and the best way to go about accomplishing an agenda was to act in an authoritarian capacity.

Moreover, the Party had installed what was termed, an Executive Committee, whose decision-making power preempted the other committees. None of the Executive Committee members were elected through State Party wide election, but, rather, ascended to such positions through elections conducted by the Party locals. As a derivative, Executive Committee officials were, in part, responsible for offering representation to the locals responsible for installing them into their Executive Committee seats.
American Ideology of Pluralism

The Greens are immured in the cultural-politico prejudices of what counterrevolutionaries in the American Academe refer to as “Pluralism:” A collection of diverse groups with divergent interests that compete with one another in order to advance their agenda through public policy. No single group is completely dominant; therefore, all groups have some impact upon the construction of public policy.

It is the elites belonging to the respective groups, who provide representativeness  to their fellow members, who share group interests. Therefore, the elites contest, collude, and negotiate with one another - interactions occurring within institutional corridors that are often left publicly opaque - in a collective orchestration of governance. During this affair these elites purportedly further the interests of the various identities that they embody.

The people, who have little say in matters related to public policy, must trust that their interests are, indeed, advocated by the social elites with whom they share affiliations; identities whose members commune with varying degrees of thickness, but all manage to elevate a capable few of their sort to positions of societal importance and influence.

According to the mainstream of American Political Theory, this Pluralism is an advanced human condition. It is the result of the maturation of American sociopolitical formation; the growth of a political system that is embodied by a society that has enlarged to dimensions in which it is no longer possible to conduct any form of direct democracy. Such an evolution is, in fact, a positive development, because democracy, itself, is paradoxically a vehicle for tyranny.

The intellectual founder of Pluralism, James Madison, made the case in the Federalist Papers. Democracy would inevitably entail the hegemony of a single faction that would come to control the political fixtures of a society. Only through the socioecological diversification - and the intermediation of the conflicting interests through the moderating temperance of governing elites - a political system sometimes referenced as Republicanism - could any semblance of democracy be preserved. In order for democracy to be salvaged, it had to be compromised to its near paralysis.

The American mythic democracy, if one is to treat history with deference, saw its demise with the defeat of the anti-Federalists; an event that resulted in the ratification of the Constitution. As Dana D. Nelson makes clear in her “Bad for Democracy: how the Presidency undermines the power of the people,” it was the implementation of a political office, operating as a locus for the consolidation of executive powers, that served as a catalyst effecting an evolutionary trajectory, resulting in a departure of American social pockets and sociopolitical aggregates of varying expansion from their traditions of radical democracy.

(This revisionist history has been told by others beside Nelson; most notably from my own perspective, a Professor of mine from Lafayette College, Joshua Miller, who argued the impossibility of democracy apart from the social conditions associated with the Colonial Epoch in American history).

For purposes of this paper, the matter of salience to be extracted from these contrarian accounts can be expressed as follows. Interpretations of our sociopolitical conditions should not be premised upon the unsalable compound propositions: America is a democracy; or America possesses a democratic kernel that can be expanded and enhanced; or America is moving along a trajectory destined toward an ever increasing democratic fulfillment.

There was, at a point in time, a democratic ethos that struggled for its preservation. However, as follows from the logic of democracy, the bands of democrats never organized or consolidated their resources in a manner that was even approachable to their adversary. American democracy was decimated by Federalism.

The men and women contributing to the end of Colonialism and Monarchy had their Revolution betrayed by the manufacturing interests, along with a lingering Toryism, which expressed itself in the authoritarian intellectual dispositions exhibited by the Federalists, who immediately concerned themselves with establishing extrademocratic fixtures, such as the First Bank: one of the initial attempts to foster a social condition that we can anachronistically reference as corporatism.

America, from its inception as a Constitutional Republic, was set along a counterrevolutionary course that has incrementally edged toward the present state of affairs: a contemporaneity where we find ourselves attempting to preserve the integrity of the nation-state in the aftermath of a Second Bush Presidency - what amounted to the most august display of authoritarianism in American history.

Bush’s sociopolitical ideology epitomized the counterrevolutionary authoritarianism that has consistently prevailed over the American Demos, who have struggled under many banners; who erupted and forced to the surface societal conflicts; who have won successions from elites in different forms and varying degrees of ostentation; but who have ultimately failed to mobilize in any sustained or strategically effectual modality.

These uprisings and revolts take on new significations - different from their conventional interpretations - when they are conceptually liberated from the prevailing ideology insisting that America is somehow, underneath it all, a democratic society; a people destined toward betterment: The idealization of a good life defined as liberal and as democratic; values that, interestingly, according to the classicist research performed by Mogens Herman Hansen, in “The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes,” are roughly aligned with the principles underlying Athenian Democracy: To live a freely as possible; or, at worse, to rule and to be ruled in turns.

Pluralism is demonstrative of an interpretive pattern. According to the heuristics forming this form of thinking, sociopolitical accomplishments - victories on the part of the people - are integrated into the overarching narrative, often termed as Whiggish History. In this framework, their values are compounded and multiplied, due to the analytical forging of interrelations among them; making each of them appear more salient because they are conceptually supported by historical incidents that are defined as ancillary. This is the deceptive mechanism at work within the rhetoric: Things are always improving; or they have improved; or they are destined to improve.

If we view these events in independence, however, their values are drastically adjusted. The People’s Party, which was the culmination of the American Agrarian Revolt, was a fleeting movement. Its social fabric dissolved into nothing that constituted an enduring social institution; nothing that would gain status in the ontology loosely constructed by Hannah Arendt.

Of course, under Whiggish pretenses, The People’s Party gave fuel to what would become the Reform Era of the early Twentieth Century; or what can be roughly conflated with the Progressive Movement: What we are told to have consisted of social reforms, demanding compliance by plutocrats, in order to free the resources necessary for the beginnings of a social welfare infrastructure.

In spite of Whggishness, there is a different story to be told; one that detaches the Progressive Era from its conventional positioning within a continuum where it is preceded by Populism and followed by the New Deal. Progressive ranks were filled with eugenicists and Plutonic proto-fascists, who took it upon themselves to deconstruct the vestiges of local political autonomy that had been the possession of the people.

This localism often translated into systems of patronage, providing uniquely devised forms of social welfare. The local autonomy could assume the form of customs and rituals through which the People policed themselves and resolved their own conflicts through their own indigenous juridical institutions and arrangements.

Progressivism was not an emancipation of people from the tyranny of wealth and their own inwardness; it was the expansion of a centralized system of governance; the consolidation of power by a growing locus of authority. In this respect, Progressives were disposed sociopolitically in a fashion akin to the Federalists.

Perhaps, Progressivism does bare relation to the New Deal; a time when Mussolini was popularly perceived and often the positive reference in the discussions undertaken among the governing elites. Indeed, Roosevelt, at the time of his inauguration, was largely expected to swell the Executive Powers to the point that Congress would be pushed to political impotency. Legislation would be established through Presidential Decree, as opposed to the parliamentary procedures organizing the Congressional Bodies, (Goldberg, 2007).

To lodge another wedge in the master-narrative we have been conditioned to internalize and actualize as the interpretive lens through which we filter events, nothing is more prescient than what social trends and prospects presently loom. After all of the supposedly interconnected advancements, our current sociopolitical condition can, nevertheless, be characterized by its gross and advancing schism – a divide between the institutions responsible for the construction of social policies and the deliberative involvement of the People.

To frame this trend in rhetorically positive terminology, the Whig would insist that society has entered into a state where power is allocated according to expertise and technocratic competency. The distribution of labor has advanced to the point where our social relationships are so complex that they can only be managed by a group of professionals; a ruling class fashioned not with gold but with the status symbols afforded from modern research universities and think-tanks; what Daniel Bell referenced as Technocracy.

Technocracy, however, is premised upon the same assumption that acts as the foundation for Pluralism: Elites are inherently disposed to provide representativeness to the groups with whom they affiliate and commune according to gradations of solidity.

Intellectual adherence to a prevailing theory was put into interesting terms by Lakatos. The philosopher termed the tenets of the belief system as core principles. They are infallible, providing a consistent frame within which one can tinker and adjust corollaries and subsidiaries in an ongoing attempt to account for inconsistencies between theory and empirical observation.

The core, however, apart from occasions where there are reports of particularly pronounced empirical anomalies, will remain unchallenged, as though it is unconscious, and it will continue to provide a bedrock upon which scientific refinement can be erected. It is the notion of Representativeness that is lodged as the core underneath Pluralist Thought.

The Green ideology resides within this overarching pattern of interpretation. Green members rarely express conceptualizations that transcend Pluralism and Representativeness. Rather than an alternative intellectual framework, under which an actor can apprehend normatively appropriate political process in qualitative contrast to what prevails, the Greens seem merely content upon tinkering within the parameters established by American Pluralism.

It is the submission to the logic and processes of Pluralism that amounts to the paradoxical existence of the Greens. They endeavor to become that which they are defined in opposition. The Illinois State Party, of which I was a member, was, perhaps, more conservative than New York or California Greens, but their inhibitions were aligned to near total methodological conformity with the normative system defined by the powers that they desired to challenge.

It always appeared as though they were in vocal protest while remaining in implicit endorsement. Campaign reform would be sought through the device of campaigning, and the reforms were predicated upon the ultimate preservation of the campaign process.

This matter has a practical dimension, as well. The Greens are, de facto, consenting to institutional processes that have been established for the purposes of allowing social groups such as the Greens to exist, but these groups never to possess enough chips to effectively wait out one, or for that matter, consecutive hands at the seven-card-draw.

Ballot access drains resources, diminishing what sparse vitality would otherwise be directed toward other aspects of the campaign. Rarely, would a Green acquire automatic access to the ballot; a condition that depended upon the prior levels of electoral success demonstrated by the Party or the specific candidate.

There were some exceptions. The most memorable, an individual who operated as a type of Party boss, who was well versed in mechanics of State politics. However, his political outfit had little chance of ever winning the State Representative position to which he electorally aspired. He amassed the support necessary to gain automatic entry on the ballot; something acquiring approximately 6% of the vote. However, his district encompassed a large university from which he drew student support.

Without the assured fixture of a banner on every ballot, for all State and subsidiary elections, it is difficult to generate the veneer of credibility; an issue that impacts relations with journalistic agents. The Greens possessed a Media Committee that was entirely ineffectual, because it had none of the established reciprocities with journalists. Being in the periphery, the Greens were not news worthy, never accomplishing the publicity necessary to effect a social condition where they could become ‘news.’

I hope this short list of illustrations is sufficient to illumine the feedbacks in the system, reinforcing the domination of the parties already in the core; and, conversely, the periphery - which is populated by the efforts of insurgents - are minimized and kept in their marginalized positions.
Pluralism: the differences between elites and masses

The expression, Politics 1.0, is intended to designate instances of political activity that embody precepts and habits underlying the political culture endemic to 20th Century America. This sociopolitical epoch exhibited, as its core feature, a mass consumerist democratic ethic: The citizen is conceived as a consumer, who is presented with selections during the electoral process, for whom the citizen can cast a vote; an act analogous to the selection and purchase of a product brand by a consumer.

This framework for democratic participation mirrors the logic underlying the free-market. Individuals and collectivities can initiate political projects, leveraging whatever resources they have accessible, which are then used to market the political package to the voting public.

The political messages that are circulated throughout the society are distributed according to the oligarchic dynamics organizing broadcast. That entails an asymmetrical structure dictating the flow of communications through the conduits embodying broadcast technologies. The few can speak to the many, but the many are left incommunicado; unable to utilize broadcasting to disseminate their own messages. Instead, the speech of the public is limited to the endorsement, expressed through the vote, for government officials and the policies they champion.

This is not to say that American society is not pluralistic. There are multiplicities of NGOs that advocate special interests. American political scientists consider these groups to be a crucial component to the functioning of a ‘democratic,’ nation-state, because the expertise that these groups amass, in the policy arenas in which they specialize, provide valuable knowledge repositories that can be drawn upon during the construction of legislation.

Depending upon the political capital that a special interest group accumulates, it can expect to be a player in the negotiations that are waged, when Congressional members work to arrive at compromises that can draw upon support, spanning various legislator sections, necessary for the bill’s passage.

“Electronic populists” - a new antagonist, largely the conceptual creation of Pluralists; against which Pluralists define themselves - are often accused of neglecting to account for the beneficial roles that are assumed by the NGOs forming American pluralism. ‘Populists,’ are sometimes criticized for overestimating the abilities of ordinary citizens to parse through the gluttony of information made available by the Internet, when the masses try to make sense out of public issues. Pursuant to this claim, Pluralists contend that there is a need for intermediaries to stand between flows of information, stemming from the government, and the citizenry.

According to pluralists, the NGOs mediate, then, deploy their expertise in order to crystallize and simplify the issues. Subsequently, reporting to their publics – the social groups whom the NGOs purport to represent – what positions should be taken in response to social problems.

This model is no doubt derived, in part, from the Sociology of Media theory referred to as Personal Influence: a framework attempting to explain the impact had upon the public by mass media; a classification, presumably, including the Internet. This theory attributes changes in behaviors and attitudes, not directly to mass media, but, instead, to the interpretations of social issues rendered public by socially respected individuals.

Underlying Causes of Politics 1.0

There were a number of factors contributing to the institutionalization of this asymmetry. The most notable antecedent to this condition was the technology itself. Messages formatted for broadcast are restrictively expensive to generate. In the case of television, an agent needs to purchase airtime from a syndicate; not to mention the expenses associated with the actual production of the message to be broadcast. One could not bypass the syndicates monopolizing television, because the “publicly owned,” finite broadcasting spectrum, was enclosed, excluding those not furnished with the necessary FCC credentials.

This is not to argue technological determinism. Rather, this feature is referenced in order to illumine a condition that Pluralism - in its defense of politics 1.0 - has failed to acknowledge in any substantive conception. Nevertheless, whether implicit or rudimentarily articulated, it bolstered Pluralism’s credence, because it made it seem inevitable.

This is the reason for the new boogieman, the electronic populist. In order to continue to effectively support politics 1.0, Pluralism must adapt to the contingencies presented by the introduction of the Internet and its decentralized means for communication.

The Internet, most saliently, is dynamic in both content and form. It should not be conceptualized as simply another medium for communication, but, instead, as a decentered apparatus in which media converge. This is an important feature because it allows for the inexpensive generation of contents in addition to their inexpensive distribution.

The message can be distributed to endpoints, consisting of interlocutors interfacing with different digital technologies, such as IPods or Amazon Kindles. This allows for the easy disbursement of messages to a mass audience; members of whom might be connected with one another through the availability of divergent technological constructs that can render the same messages; albeit according to varying formatting; whether it be, for instance, an e-book, a web site, or an audio book.

Media convergence provides convenience for the end-user, who desires to become a content creator, because he can propagate a message, sending it counterparts comprising his social networking, relatively effortlessly and without the inhibitive consumption of resources. This is because multi-stream publishing can be accomplished through the relatively effortless conversion of digital contents into other digital media, rendering them compatible with different types of devices that interface with the interlocutors.

Additionally, these are significant qualities because they help to precipitate social events; most notably of which involves viral marketing: a form of advertising that relies upon end-users to further distribute the message to multiple counterparts in social networks; consequently, proliferating the message exponentially.

Broadcasting, contrastively, does not facilitate media convergence. Therefore, it is more difficult to propagate a message by converting it to multiple formats, in order to deliver messages to diverse rendering instruments, which, in the case of analogue, include television, radio, or newspaper.

Analogue, as a means for republication, not only degrades quality, it is tedious. This results from the work of translating the contents from one medium to another; a task that must be achieved in the absence of a common language that can be reduced from different forms of analogue transmissions.

In the case of digitization, all media are constructed from binary code: 1’s and 0’s that are that assembled by the particular instrument according to blocks, which can vary in size, and can signify different semantic qualities depending upon the specific pattern of 1’s and 0’s that memory spaces are programmed to instantiate.

Since all digital media share binary coding as the basis upon which their higher order linguistic constructs are assembled, they can be encoded from one digital language to another through precisely duplicable algorithmic models; not necessarily allowing for a lossless conversion, because the programming can embody different semantic attributes. At the very least, however, it is an expedited conversion, making it accessible to masses.

Due to the Internet, Pluralism must construct a rationale against its directly democratic possibilities. In this operation, Pluralists will, in addition to the need for expertise, charge that electronic populists suspect that the Internet will relieve the necessity for divergent groups to exist within the direct democratic social order. They argue that this condition is impracticable in addition to its obvious undesirability.

This is not to say that there are no mitigations to the elitist control of broadcasting and, more generally, the social organization of Politics 1.0. The Public Sphere Theory of Mass Media does inform some decision-making by agencies who are left with the responsibility of overseeing the corporate entities that have procured licenses to distribute their contents via the finite spectrum available to broadcast media. To a small extent, such regulations make available “airtime,” to the public.

This accommodation, however, is diminutive. Furthermore, during the era of deregulation, whatever quasi-Habermasian changes to mass media - generated from the adoption of a Public Sphere Theory posture - were left to fallow. This is representative of the decline suffered by other petty capitalistic reorganizational-devices that were instituted as a result of Populism. Antimonopoly and Antitrust, in the age of neoliberalism, have lost most of their vigor; a negation allowing for the cultivating of monstrosities, such as AIG and other Uber-corporations.

Liberalism is not equivalent to Pluralism. Pluralism is, instead, its apologia. Pluralism merely tinkers within the parameters laid out by Liberalism in an attempt to fit it to empirical anomalies. In defiance of its claims, Liberalism allows for the formation of an elitist governing section that manages society and its governance. Pluralism attempts to account for this inconsistency.

Progressivism is an idiom of this elitism. The idea of a managerial class in America is manifested in Lippman’s Platonism, not to mention the Mussolini corporatism embraced by most other Progressives. In terms of the successors to Franklin Roosevelt, this elitist ideology becomes the “Mandarin Syndrome,” whose symptoms were particularly pronounced, according to Chomsky, in the Harvard-exclusivist Kennedy Administration.

One such competitor to liberal democracy – whose contrast with liberalism is particularly pronounced – prescribes a political ordering that operates with a kernel, consisting of consensus building deliberations, achieved through public dialog. Habermas – who is probably the most recognizable figure to advocate a democratic theory that enumerates such qualities, contradicting many of the premises underlying liberal democracy – maintained that all members of society possessed the intellectual faculties required to engage in deliberations over public policy.

In fact, since Habermas proffered the concept, rationality, not as a systemization of thought demonstrable in the cognitions belonging to monadic agents, but as a product of a type of sociability that is structured according to basic principles that Habermas had enunciated; i.e., the egalitarian distribution of publicity, allowing for all members of the public to coequally address counterparts – rational contributions are not contingent upon individual faculties.

Pursuant to a definition of rationality that asserts it to be a by-product of interactivity enacted under qualified conditions, political decision-making is understood as something that benefits from participatory inclusion. That is, it is not a matter so much of making sure that the best people are making decisions; instead, it is the social conditions under which the dialog is committed that will culminate into the best decisions.

Despite the availability of Habermas as a dissident voice, the Greens that I observed do not consider this model to be a viable option. It might find representation in some Green literature, but the practices and practical decision-making undertaken by the Greens does not conform to this alternative conceptualization of political praxis.

What is striking about the Green failure to embrace a deliberative and direct democracy - in both their internal praxes and their political agenda - is that the instruments to overcome practicable inhibitions are right in front of them. It is the Internet and its possibilities for facilitating existential change that the Greens have failed to seize upon in a substantive way.

The Greens have Internet forums in which they conduct some business, but the forums are modeled according to a schema that manifests the same hierarchical corporatism we see in other political organizations. The Greens have their equivalent to a Steering Committee; what the Greens call their Executive Committee, for instance. It will be described more thoroughly in latter descriptions, but, for now, it is important to note that it embodies the managerial class that dominates the affairs internal to the Illinois Green Party.

Dissimilarly to the scenario associated with the political organization depicted by Habermas, liberalism does not provision for the participation of the citizenry during the formative processes out of which public policy is forged.

This is not to say that advocates of liberal democracy, such as Rawls, who maintained a commitment to Kant’s notion of Practical Reasoning, did not incorporate into their models an insistence upon a forum into which the citizenry can converge, forming an assembly wherein individuals participate in a public debate over pertinent social issues; a type of intellectual stimulation that would aid citizens in making informed choices when voting, so that their selections for a candidate would be based upon a more informed and lucid understanding of his or her interests as well as which candidate would better advocate such interests.

Rawls argument is deceptive. He masks his underlying elitism with Practical Reasoning. But to note, there continues to be a schism between governance and the people. Kant’s system of deliberativeness entailed directness. Rawls, instead, defers to elected officials. It is in respect to this elitism that Rawls is connectible to Pluralism.

What is more, the issues presented to the electorate, according to his political schema, are not derived through organic processes; rather, matters of gravity are introduced through the advocacies of the professional ruling class: political agents, who belong to parties or NGOs; who run for offices; who promote agenda; who provide voters with choices, or politicians with auxiliary expertise.

Therefore, the democratic model proposed by Rawls and many of his 20th Century contemporaries continues to embody the consumerist ethic. The people vote for the best packaged politic available on the ballot.

The Green Party - despite its use of the Internet - subscribes to a model of organization that is roughly equivalent to the lines drawn by Rawls. Expertise is favored to the wisdom of the crowd, and deliberative mechanisms can be the province of the public as long as they do not infringe upon the decision-making prerogatives of the managerial class. This is demonstrative of the Green captivity under the core principles imposed by Pluralism

Illinois Green Party’s Workflow Design

The green party conducts the overwhelming preponderance of its deliberations using an Internet based service that is provided by Yahoo!, referred to as Yahoo! Groups. The forums that can be created using Yahoo! Groups are customizable, offering various options that the end-user can select when structuring the forum according to his or her needs.

To cite an example of one of the options available to the forum administrator, the contents within the forum can be rendered private, allowing only registered members to peruse the contents that have been deposited in the forum’s spaces. Additionally, the administrator of the group is equipped with a variety of read and write delegations. Therefore, the administrator can selectively extend permissions to various members of the forum; thus, limiting who can post topic starters or responses to topics that have already been published.

It should also be noted that the members of the forum – even those with no elevated status – can activate or deactivate various features, specifying the way in which the user interfaces with the forum to which he possesses membership. One can select whether to receive email notifications every time a message is posted. If the end-user cares not to be bombarded with automated emails that are sent after every posting, he or she can elect to receive a bulk email once daily, or once weekly. Further, the forum end-user can typically select the personal information that he or she will make available to other members of the forum. However, the forum administrator can limit the available specificities that can be tailored by the end-user as he or she personalizes the end-user/application interface.

Workflow Design

Subgroups within the forum can be created, and the membership of such divisions can be further restricted by the administrator. The generation of such subgroups was essential for the establishment of an online venue that could model the actual organizational structure of the Party. Committees that comprise the organization of the Green Party can use a subgroup specification to conduct its deliberations.

The committee, in fact, can have control over the particular rules that govern their interactions through administrative functions whose scope extends to encompass the sub-forum that has been defined for the committee. Members of the Party can assume various statuses that are defined under the rules and procedures of the customized forum, and the permissions that are afforded to the participants can correspond to the authorities that he or she possesses in the party organization.

In the case of the state party in which I participated, the forum consisted of 2 general spaces; one of which was designated for any announcements that were related to events and affairs not directly associated with the Party; the other of which involved a representational space intended for postings directly related to the Party and its particular addendum and the entailing work. Both of these spaces possess the potential to display deliberations regarding the organization of the Party. However, such dialogues are not frequent, and appeared to be deemed improper by the leaders of the Party, who preferred for such communications to be conducted in specified spaces, in which committee work was performed.

In addition to these two spaces in which any member of the Party can participate, through posting topics and responses to the contents published by other participants, there were sub-forums intended to facilitate communications among members of the committees that were defined according to their purpose in the organization.

For instance, the Party – during the time I was a practicing member – possessed an executive committee, which operated, more or less, in a capacity similar to what is typically assumed by a steering committee within most parliamentary bodies. Additionally, to offer one more example, the Party was endowed with a media and publicity committee that was geared toward the management of relations between the Party and journalism syndicates, with whom the Party desired to form relationships in order to break out of the obscurity that is otherwise suffered by third parties.

Each committee has a particular function in the context of party projects and activities. Since the objectives underlying the work of the committees differ, each committee is confronted with peculiar exigencies. Further, the personalities of the committee members – which are a product of cultural conditioning as well as any number of other factors – through their convergence, manifest dialogic events and processes that are comparatively unique to the social dynamics operative in other subgroups.

This is to be expected since each subgroup is a unique composite of actors, who are all endowed with somewhat peculiar prejudices and preconceptions brought from their conditioning from exposure to socializing agents  exogenous to the stretches of organization embodied by the State Party.

As a result of these contingencies befalling each committee, they have developed their own micro-cultures, formed out of the habituations derived from the ongoing efforts on the part of their members to interact efficaciously; an accomplishment that requires the members to build mutually held expectations – both explicit and implicit – that structure and allocate the work. Nevertheless, each committee has a member of the Executive Committee within its ranks.

In the case of the state Green Party in which I was embedded, the primary Party boss, who held various leadership capacities in the State Party and, additionally, possessed powerful positions in the National Party structure, who was supposedly especially skilled at moving committees along the trajectories toward the realization of some of their agenda. As a result, this member took it upon himself to sit on several committees, in order to offer the groups the benefits of his substantial experiences in party organization.

The subdivision of spaces produced what effectively amounted to forums within the forum. Each committee possessed some autonomy, permitting it to devise its own procedures and regulations governing the conduct of its members. For the most part, the institutional configurations constructed by the committees were not expressly coded in the bylaws; instead, as standing rules: conventions that members of the group came to embody in their practices, through processes of mundane problem solving and habituation.

Therefore, in comparison to the prescriptions expressly stipulated by the Party, the conventions that qualified as standing rules were more flexible, since they could be modified without recourse to formalized procedures necessitated in order for one to alter the codified provisions belonging to the explicit body of bylaws.

Another aspect that is worthy of mention is the fact that standing rules are positioned at the bottom of the analytical hierarchy that arranges how the various stipulations deposited in the bylaws interrelate to one another. Simply put, the standing rules – that are developed from the ongoing practices undertaken by the organization’s members – fit into the lowest tier of the ranking determining which bylaw is preemptive.

For instance, if an organization possesses a charter – which serves as a constitution – and has further specified its procedures by constructing bylaws, the principles embedded in the constitution would supersede in authority the rules enacted in the form of bylaw legislation.

Extending this logic to the next step, the standing rules – customs that were developed from behaviors intended to manage ecological contingencies that were unanticipated or considered to be too mundane for their inclusion in bylaws – can only exist as long as they do not contradict the higher order principles that prescribe appropriate patterns of organizational conduct.

The State Bylaws, to extrapolate from preceding descriptions, conform to an information type architecture that embodies a centralized systemization into which the information types are integrated and interrelated to their counterparts according to an analytic hierarchy.  It is this organizational pattern that informs the Party members – mostly those who assume positions of leadership – as to how they should structure the interplay among the various committees comprising the party organization.

Adding to the obfuscation of the actual events culminating into the decisions that are made by party committees, the Executive Committee of the Party, had weekly teleconferences during which official votes were taken. The minutes of these meetings was eventually published by the committee member assuming the capacity of secretary. However, the minutes would fail to reflect the motivations behind the adoption of policies. Therefore, the intent underlying some of the measures would be difficult to interpret, unless on had access to the interactions under which they were incepted and ratified.

Bylaw Structure

The Green Party describes itself as an organization that self-governs through the practice of grass-roots democracy: a form of reckoning that endows the basic Membership of the Party with the authority to directly and preemptively legislate. However, in practice, this authority is rarely invoked. Partially, because the Membership of the Party only convenes once or twice a year during party conventions. And, according to the constitutional structure of the Party, it is only during these physical convergences that bylaws can be modified.

Apart from these annual or semiannual events, the party organization lacks a forum in which Membership can assemble in person, in order for it to perform the dialogic processes through which it enacts legislation. This has practical failings. Greens cannot organizationally adapt as quickly as necessary. Contingencies are not exploited or effectively pacified.

On several occasions, I suggested that the Greens reorient, dismissing the ordinary projects, consisting of pursuing the highest profile political contests that were possible, such as the race for the Office of Governor.

In lieu, I suggested that the Party engage entirely in civic advocacy and patronage. An example would be the establishment of credit cooperatives and consumer unions that could leverage and effectively negotiate with the interests forming the supply side. However, the management of the Party was disinclined, and direct legislation was an impossibility due to the absence a temporally near Party Convention.

As compensatory for the inability to legislate rapidly, ruling structures in the Party were not heavily beholden to the constitution and, during the time of my observation, these officers and the Executive Committee Members were involved in legislating by decree.

One example was the Party boss, to whom I have already made reference. Officially, the Chair of the Party, he assumed additional capacities, such as the Moderator of the Internet Forums; a position that was never legislatively created. His decisions often possessed legislative entailments, declaring what speech was permissible versus speech that could be sanctioned. Such decisions were based upon principles that were never legislatively enacted according to the appropriate processes.

It should be mentioned that discussion concerning matters related to the organization of the Party can transpire in the virtual spaces that are utilized for the purpose of facilitating inner-party communications and deliberations. There are general forums in which ordinary Party Members, not in possession of any other Party capacity, can engage in dialog. However, Party decisions are never made through such a vehicle for deliberations.

Additionally, many of the committees rely upon these Internet based forums in order for them to manage their affairs. Anybody can join one of the lower ranking committees and participate. However, these committees have no power that is not subsumed under the directives of the Executive Committee. To reinforce its managerial dominance, the Executive Committee places one of its members on every lower standing committee.

The Executive Committee attempts to remain as opaque as possible, in respect to its internal decisions and the general Party Membership. Their weekly meetings - times during which they render their ‘official,’ decisions - are conducted by phone conferencing, and only certain officials, who are not on the Committee, possess the prerogative to listen to what transpires.

There is another dynamic reinforcing these Party conditions, in which a managerial core had developed. In addition to the physical limitations, preventing Party Conventions on more than an annual or semiannual basis, the behavioral dispositions instantiated by the membership do not lend themselves to any robust direct democracy.

They appear to operate as inhibitors, preventing them from publicly advocating, within the context of inner-party deliberations, their positions on Party matters - an inference that I made from observations of the general forums in which such activity could go on; although it would have had - and did have on sparse occasions - varying significations that were indicated by an adjustment in the temperament of a Party leader’s positions. However, it calls for restating, there were formal constitutional structures preventing legislation to occur within Internet spaces.

This reluctance is symptomatic of either a lack of political confidence or an apathetic party character.  In all likelihood, the absence of inner-party engagement by the rank and file is a byproduct of some combination of the two aforementioned attributes.

In light of this governing vacuum, a handful of members have assumed what amounts to leadership capacities - both in formal respects and in informal respects; meaning, the influential members served as officers and Executive Committee members. The Executive Committee was comprised of officials elected from Party Locals. Nevertheless, due to the repetition at which the same person sat on the Executive Committee, it is fair to assume that another force was at work; something comparable to a tribal eldership.

Concluding Remarks

The Green Party conceives of itself according to an organizational architecture that resembles the prototypical configuration of American business firms; in particular, firms that are associated with the Old Business Model that dominated the epoch of industrial capitalism. That is, similarly to American corporations and their operations, the Greens strive to integrate their members and subgroups into a systemization that possesses a centralized command structure.

Such a model for social organization is hierarchical, endowing agencies on top of its verticality with broader powers while those members who are positioned on the bottom are constrained to follow the organizational decisions manufactured by members aligned higher in the enterprise.

Most notably, this form of social organization – where we can observe collective behaviors – is founded upon the following premise: In order for an organization to function in a way that is coherent and productive, it must be centralized so that an executive office can coordinate all of its constituent elements. In the case of the Illinois Green Party, the Executive Committee was actually oligarchic, but served the same function, all the same.

Think of this executive as the equivalent of an organism’s central nervous system, (CNS): It is this system-control command structure that manages all of the components collectively constituting the organism. It is through the centralized management that the system is regulated and controlled; corrective functions reacting to processional breakdowns. Additionally, it is the deliberativeness of the system-control that formulates the plans through which projects are attempted and, under felicitous circumstances, brought to completion.

This push toward centralization was not a topic of consternation among Party Members, when I was participating in the State Green Party. Additionally, the National Party structure was undergoing the same morphological transformation; again, there appeared to be no controversy or dissent, apart from a few of my contacts who would complain to be privately. These institutional modifications were seen by many members as necessary reforms that should ultimately help the Party develop into a more advanced state; one in which the Party will be better configured and postured when competing with the American party duopoly.

When attempting to come to terms with the Green Party’s inclination to emulate the very sociopolitical organizations that it hoped to displace, I frequently asked members whether it was strategically sound to attempt to “Beat them at their own game?”

One must keep mindful of the fact that the present electoral systems possessed by the States are the products of the legislative statutes largely instituted during the Progressive Era; a time when localism came under attack. In the process, the two national parties consolidated powers, and third parties were pushed to the margins; even, at the state and provincial levels of the federal structure.

Under the veneer of fighting corruption, Progressivism laid the politico-juridical structure in which third parties were impotent. The system has been designed to prevent third parties from effectively competing. The failure of the Greens to think outside of this systemization prevented their advocacies from contributing to anything other than the continuation of what was already established.

In the following chapter on the Populist Party of America, I strive to tangibly demonstrate the possibility of an alternative politic; one that transcends the established order; how things stand now.

Tags: politics, populist party, Russell Coles Blog, third parties
Categories: Commentary, Populist Party, Russell Cole's Blog, Politics, Third Parties
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On January 4th 2008, I happened to stumble across CNN’s Larry King, who was mediating a debate between a fairly moderate representative of the Arab American institute, James Zogby, and the relentless Israeli apologist, Alan Dershowitz.

Needless to say, the 400 or so Palestinians who had suffered the fate rhetorically sanitized under the rubric, ‘collateral damage,’ were not the victims of the Israelis, according to the logic of Dershowitz; rather, they were victims of Hamas.

After all, Hamas members failed to extricate themselves from the densely populated territory, wherein Hamas provided social services, in order to line up in some type of military formation, so that they would become the unmistakable target for the Israelis. Therefore, the mounting civilian casualties were the fault of Hamas, because the organization neglected to cooperate with its adversaries.

Never mind the fact that it was the Israelis who dropped the bombs – destroying all sorts of Palestinian institutions, such as the university; various government edifices, including the Ministry of Culture; and numerous domestic dwellings that happened to be located next to the residencies of Hamas officials, whom the Israelis have been assassinating through the use of missiles.

When questioned about the yearlong embargo, which has been waged by the Israelis, preventing humanitarian aid from entering the besieged territory, Dershowitz indicated that Israel was not to blame. In order to understand the logic behind the claim leveled by Dershowitz, one must ignore every ostensible aspect to this situation, because one’s plain perceptions and commonsensical reasoning are obfuscated and circumvented by the polemic that Dershowitz has constructed.

I would compare Dershowitz’s argument to something stereotypically spouted by the abusive male in a dysfunctional heterosexual relationship. Similarly to the wife-beater who screams at the object of his physical abuse, “Why do you make me hurt you?” the illegal embargo is not the fault of the party that implements and maintains it; it is the fault of the victim, the Palestinian population.

According to the law professor, Dershowitz, the people of the Gaza Strip should overthrow their democratically elected leaders – who are members of the political section of Hamas – in order for the Israelis to accomplish their military-politico objectives, so that the Israelis can cease with their ongoing strangulation of the Palestinian population.

Finally, we come to the crescendo of Dershowitz’s apologia for the Israelis. The Professor from Harvard generalized the war being waged by the Israelis against the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip as embodying a struggle that all democratic nations face. Therefore, in order to ascertain the essence of the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, one must ignore the historical specificities that led to the current state of affairs.

Push aside and ignore the fact that the Israelis are colonists who have displaced millions of Palestinians from their traditional homeland. Forget about the hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese captives who are illegally held in extrajudicial limbo by the Israelis. Neglect to consider that the Israelis had suffered zero casualties, resulting from the missile attacks launched from Gaza, prior to the Israeli incursions, which have led to over 500 Palestinian deaths, including women and children.

According to Dershowitz, all of these facts are epiphenomena, and matter not at all when arriving at an understanding of the present situation. Dershowitz argues that this ongoing conflict is reducible to the following: A democracy defending itself against terrorism.

In response to Dershowitz, I suppose we can say, one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.

Tags: religion, Russell Coles Blog, Terrorism, War on Terror
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By Russell Cole

To begin, you might take a moment’s pause when I mention that Foucault – who developed the analytic, Bio-power, which is designed to make sense out of social power in Modernity – had originally set out to study the development of sexuality.

One’s first inclination is to presume that sexuality has remained constant throughout the scope of the history of human existence. This might be true with respect to the purely biological aspects of sexuality, allowing for reproduction. Although, even such an assumption might not be entirely supportable, since subversive biology has introduced into the mix various gradients – what are called morphs – which constitute additional sexual classifications, which – despite their androgyny, in many cases – continue to provide important functions within the inner-workings of genetic populations.

In order to dislodge many preconceptions of sexuality that you might possess, which translate into expectations that sexual identities have been a constant throughout the whole of the human experience, I should point out that Hellenistic Culture did not make distinctions among sexual archetypes. They did not search for a deep, hidden truth whose revelation would lead to an attribution upon the Being of a particular sexual type.

Men were simply utilizing pleasures of the body; sometimes with other men; sometimes with pubescent boys; other times with women, such as their wives or the prostitutes who populated certain temples.

All of these activities failed to possess any significance beyond merely constituting pleasures. They were not demonstrative of underlying psychic morphologies translatable into sexual identities.

They failed to possess concepts, marking social identities, such as gay, or heterosexual, or pedophile. In fact, man-boy relationships were considered appropriate as long as they were structured according to ethical imperatives that reflected the fact that the participants in these relations were both Free Men; the man and the boy. Therefore, there were concerns about the man dominating the boy in the relationship, and subjecting the younger counterpart to a form of subjugation inappropriate for any Free Man to endure. Consequently, these relationships were fomented through an elaborate courting process where the older man would present the boy with gifts until the younger member in the affair finally felt that it was appropriate for him to reciprocate in a romantic fashion.

This process might be comparable to popular conceptions in American society regarding the courtship stages that are executed in order for a man to seduce a woman. The woman, for various reasons – not least of which includes potentially being labeled as sexually promiscuous – reserves from engaging in intimate relations with the man – according to this perception of heterosexuality and its entailments – until she feels she has performed sufficient impression management work to ensure that her motives appear to involve more than simply inciting the pleasures associated with sexual intercourse.

The preceding description is, of course, not universally held, and is now way supposed to be more than a reference to what might be considered a traditional conceptualization of sexuality in American society. Obviously, following the Second Wave of Feminism and its entailing revision of the definitions of ‘woman’ and its relationship to ‘man,’ many women no longer feel the encumbrance experienced by such a ritualism.

Furthermore, it should be mentioned that Sexual Liberationist ideologies have existed prior to the Sexual Revolution that is typically associated with the 1960’s. Sexual Liberation was prevalent during periods such as the 1920’s; sometimes – although not entirely accurately – associated with the counter-cultural movements referred to as the Bohemians. In opposition to the Sexual Liberationist discourses, scholars in sexuality typically identify what is referred to as Sexual Communitarian discourses, which stress the important of placing moral restrictions upon sexuality for the benefit of societal and community social structures.

Referring back to Hellenistic sexual conventions, I do not want to explore this subject any further, for obvious reasons. However, compare this understanding of the identities and the expected relationships among them – especially, since the older men who seduced, “The beautiful boys of Athens,” also had wives and the men would, additionally, partake in sexual activities with their wives – with our current understanding of sexuality, which the Greeks, quite obviously, did not possess.

For purposes of administrative expediency – when it comes to correcting behaviors socially defined as deviant – we have medicalized sexuality; consequently, leading to an understanding a man-boy relationship as something that indicates more than a pleasure of the body, but, additionally, an underlying psychic abnormality, and, in fact, a pathology that we might call pedophilia.

Now consider, why have we created an intellectual environment where we have academic professionals devoting their careers to the study of this invisible – although, ‘character’ defining – a psychiatric attributete – residing somewhere in a space we can only imagine in our mind’s eye – referred to as the psyche? Why do we as a culture find this kind of relationship – which must be a result of our cultural conditioning, because the Greeks certainly did not possess such a sediment – so aberrant? What social forces are responsible for generating a cultural condition where we feel compelled to regulate – not only health – but what descriptions or polemics can be offered while being taken seriously, regarding issues pertaining to sexuality? If one is labeled under a social category that falls under the provision of psychiatry, he or she no longer possesses the prerogative to participate in public discourse regarding issues and public policies concerning such matters.

Obviously, the institutional forces responsible for conditioning us to interpret particular behaviors as symptomatic of illness have a profound effect, because they not only define what constitutes a sexually related pathology, but preemptively discredit those who might argue in opposition to the medico-juridical discourses produced by these institutions. I would suggest that the ultimate precipitant to our aversions toward socially defined ‘unnatural’ forms of sexuality rests in our conditioning into a systematization of social institutions and, more specifically, the relationships and conducts – what we call roles in sociology – they define and impose upon our bodies and the ways we use them.

Further, our internalization of these codes, which we come to apply upon ourselves when evaluating our own behaviors, and, additionally, what we should aspire to when comporting in the social reality we have been socialized to understand and embody with respect to its prescriptions for healthy versus unhealthy modes of conduct. All of the definitions of good health versus pathology are definitions and understandings generated by the complex of disciplinarian-knowledge-constructing-institutions that have been littered so prolifically in the civil societies of Modernity.

It is due to the semiotics of these disciplines – i.e., psychologists, doctors, social workers, sociologists, demographers, and criminologists – where they symbolically own membership to science – that their discourses are endowed with a preemptive property causing them to trump their knowledge competitors; thus, reserving the authority to legislate truth. This is all fine and good. However, think back to the hyperactive – or, what we could, in a different sense, refer to as aware and attentive to his surroundings – young male, who fails to conform with behavioral expectations; resulting in his treatment by medical professions, who feed him stimulants in order to make him disinterested with the environment that surrounds him, and, instead, capable and willing to stare into a text book, as he is trained to assume a position as a laborer – where he performs mind numbing repetitive tasks – contributing to the production of resources that ultimately belong to other people.

All of these forms of correction and treatment and training fall under the expansion of the concept, bio-power. Concretely, I am referring to the interests that compel society to regulate the pleasures of the body in a way the implements sexuality as an organizing schema that maintains social relationships in way that society is ensured of reproducing – in an orderly and consistent manner – the identities, who are defined by virtue of their contributions to the production of social resources.

In order to regulate this system, so that it continues to function, disciplinarians have innovated an expansive repository of knowledge implemented – often through the operations of medical professionals, such as doctors and psychiatrists, and quasi-health care professionals, such as social workers and counselors, who have devised corrective mechanisms serviceable for the purposes of normalizing behaviors that fail to conform to this homogenized field of social agents whose existences are integrated into a systematization, allowing for the manufacturing and disproportionate distribution of products.

Tags: bio power, decentralization, foucault, governing, mental health, power, Russell Coles Blog, self governance
Categories: Commentary, Russell Cole's Blog, self-governance, foucault, Power, mental health
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An Article by:

Russell Cole

Virtually every mainstream economist has consented to the veracity of the following proposition:

The current financial turmoil has been created by the deregulation of the housing mortgage industry.

Despite near consensus over the causation of America’s current hardships, there continues to exist one ideological camp that argues differently. This is not unexpected, however, because the mainstream understanding of the present economic conditions and the forces underlying them is fundamentally irreconcilable with the core tenets of their belief system.

I am referring to the School of Austrian Economics and their alternative explanation for the precipitants of the current collapse of the housing market and its devastating impact upon our financial systems. According to adherents of this ideology – what amounts to a Cult of the Laissez-faire – it was not deregulation that paved the way for this state of affairs under which we suffer; rather, it was the intervention of government upon economic processes; namely, the Federal Reserve’s manipulation of our monetary system, which is based upon a currency whose value is not backed by any commodity of intrinsic worth, but, instead, by fiat.

Through the Federal Reserve’s manipulation of the Dollar – as part of their attempt to render a condition wherein credit was artificially inexpensive, allowing for markets to bubble – they contributed to the ballooning of the subprime mortgage industry. In fact, it was Greenspan who intentionally bolstered the subprime loan industry by continuing to make credit cheap and accessible through the manipulation of interest rates.

In this essay, I concede that the Austrian School’s interpretation of events is fundamentally correct. Specifically, it certainly was the Federal Reserve and the stimulus that it provided to the housing market that created the housing bubble. However, I do take exception with the implications that the Austrian School draws from its explanation of market bubbles and the economic turbulence that bubbles incite through their collapse.

My argument is two-part:

First, I argue that bubbles in markets are not inherently undesirable. Rather, they are tool to be used by government in order to motivate the production and acquisition of the hardware, contributing to American infrastructure, that is often accounted for under the rubric, capital expenditures: investments in things that have a lasting value.

Secondly, I argue that the current despair in the American economy – and the massive bailout that was orchestrated by Congress – could have been prevented by an expanded definition and a more rigorous enforcement of anti-monopoly and anti-trust. These firms that are supposedly ‘too large to fail,’ should have never gotten to that point with which to begin. In short, anti-trust and anti-monopoly should have been imposed preventing these firms from procuring a corner on markets allowing for such corporate enormity. These firms have amassed such a presence that they are no longer competitors in a sector of the economy; instead, these overgrown monstrosities are themselves the economic subsystems, and, therefore, their bankruptcy entails systemic failures to the economy.

What is a matter with bubbles?

According to libertarians, who subscribe to Austrian economics, bubbles are disturbances to markets that are created through government tampering in monetary systems. Government, for instance, might elect to provide artificially inexpensive credit; subsequently, allowing for economic agents to obtain capital in order to purchase and consume. This extension of accessible credit might serve to propagate a sector of the economy. However, the particular market that expands due to this governmental intervention is unsustainable in that it will cease to exist after the economic stimulus is retracted and there is no longer a means for members of the consumer market to leverage the capital necessary to consume the commodity defining this inflated sector.

Libertarians – using this simplified model, or some version of it, as justificatory support – argue against the intrusion of governmental agencies who control and regulate economic activity. They insist that only government can create market distortions, and, therefore, if not for government, the economy would not exhibit the volatility associated with crashes and the recessionary periods that they can precipitate. Without the Federal Reserve, for instance, there never would have been the housing market crises from which American society currently suffers.

It is not my intention to argue directly against this picture of the economy and government’s relation to it. However, it is my position that this picture is incomplete. Libertarians fail to recognize that bubbles serve practical purposes. They can be used to accomplish projects that have enduring legacies, because these artificially supported market expansions contribute to the future functioning of the economy and the society that it serves.

A prescient example of the utility of bubbles is found in the 19th Century, during the period when the Federal Government attempted to bolster the development of the railroading industry by offering incentives. The vibrancy of the railroading industry, which was partially the product of governmental intervention, came to an eventual deceleration, as the artificial stimulus failed to continue to fuel its frenetic growth rate, causing some pronounced economic readjustment. Nevertheless, despite the economic slowdown that ensued, the Country was left with an enhanced infrastructure; one where the railroading system connected various population centers that were previously separated by vast distances that would have otherwise impaired commerce and travel. In short, the facilitation of the railroading industry – which was accomplished through governmental intervention – aided in America’s domestication of its capacious geography.

Another obvious example of the usefulness of bubbles involves a more recent development in American history.  The technology boom, which was created during the Clinton Administration, crashed after the collapse of the Dot Com market. However, during the rapid expansion of the technology sector, large segments of the population acquired Internet service. Additionally, due to the increased demand for the Internet, investments were made in broadband; resulting in the materialization of an augmentation to society’s infrastructure that has provided immeasurable benefits to the economy, not to mention its contributions to other spheres of society; i.e., knowledge centers, such as academic libraries that now offer remotely accessible electronic reserves: repositories of hypertext that can be searched using adaptations of the programming applications associated with the more generally specialized Internet search engines, such as MSN and Google.

It is difficult to appreciate the full extent of the technological innovations that have been spawned – as subsidiaries – of the underlying platform, the Internet. However, one can feel confident in saying that the proliferation of digital artifices that transact with one another using available broadband – which enhance our abilities to communicate and exchange information – has had a transformative impact upon our habitual modes of social comportment. These communicative devices have changed the way in which we relate to others. They have generated a whole field of possibilities in the economy, civil society, and the political sphere; opportunities that might never have been disclosed if not for the Dot Com boom of the 1990s.

From these few examples, I hope that it is evident that the artificial inflation of economic markets by government can serve useful purposes. However, this is not to say that governmental interdiction in economic affairs is not fraught with dangers. Special interests might be favored by regulators; thus, amounting to a situation where it is not society that is benefited though government’s propagation of a market, but merely segments of the economy who directly profiteer from the market’s expansion.

In relation to considerations resulting from this line of inquiry, I have often heard the argument against the Austrian School and its insistence upon a return to a commodity backed monetary system that can be paraphrased as follows: In lieu of a Gold Standard, all that needs to be done is to do away with the extra-democratic Federal Reserve and, as a substitute, have Representatives in Congress make decisions affecting currency and its availability as well as other policies impacting financial markets. According to this counter to the Libertarian platform, it is the not the absence of regulation that is desirable; rather, it is the democratization of the regulatory fixtures that oversee economic activity.

Too big to fail?

We are often subjected to this argument when the Federal Reserve or Congress elects to save one of the economy’s larger corporations from impending bankruptcy. We are told that the economy as a whole would suffer from the ripple effects of such a formidable collapse. However, these appeals for government bailouts always appear hypocritical if not entirely insincere. It is always those who are the adherents of free-market economics, when it serves their interests, who are left making appeals for governmental intervention when their speculations do not pan out. One is left to suspect that the risks underlying their business decisions are made under the pretext that even if their investments suffer from a “black swan*,” catastrophe, they, ultimately, can rely upon government to prevent their dissolution because they are, after all, ‘too large to fail.’

If we look to the current situation in which we find ourselves, if we were to follow along the lines suggested by the Austrian School, we would simply allow these corporate monstrosities to go under.  In turn, our economy would enable competitors to enter the market; firms that would be structured according to a sounder business model, who would better understand risks and how they should impact their investments.

This approach to the current problems we face, however, is no assurance that this will not happen again in the future; where we are placed in a situation in which the failure of overgrown financial firms causes systemic reverberations, possibly resulting in recession or depression.

“Greed is good,” perchance, in an limited array of situations. However, when greed is allowed to compel men to act without any countervailing regulations designed to mitigate the adverse consequences that might result from the unleashing of this baser mental predicate, the Executives of the Financing industry will pursue their bonuses with temerity, because the paper salaries they receive will compensate for any loss they might suffer with respect to their stock options.

A more effective policy maneuver would consist of more robust anti-monopoly and anti-trust regulations that would compel regulators to thwart these types of firms from ever growing to a state where their failure would entail large scale economic repercussions. Therefore, the answer to our current woes is not be found in the Laissez-faire that is advocated by Libertarians, who follow in the tradition of Austrian economics. Rather, the best approach consists of smarter regulations that anticipate these occurrences and enable regulators to actively work against them.

Tags: congress, corporations, economics, economy, government, Russell Coles Blog
Categories: Commentary, Economics, government, Russell Cole's Blog, Congress, Corporations
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An Article by:

Russell Cole

Bad for Democracy is scheduled for publication in September of 2008

In order to ascertain the significance of the thesis propounded by Dana D. Nelson in her manuscript, Bad for Democracy, it is useful to first characterize the way in which American democracy is perceived according to the collective representations, instructing the political understandings possessed by the preponderance of Americans.

American mythology instructs us that the composition and ratification of the Constitution serve as historical markers for the solidification of American democracy. According to this narrative, prior to the Revolution, there was a growing democratic fervor. Ultimately, this ground swelling of radical democratic sentiment resulted in a rebellion against Monarchy and colonialism. Following the independence of the American Colonies, the devotion to democratic ideals continued; albeit, in a form that was reckless and unsustainable due to its unmanageability. As a consequence, the Founders of the Nation saw fit to innovate a political structure that both manifested democratic principles as well as a state with a workable governability. From there on, as this orthodox history suggests, the Nation was set along a course leading to the continual improvement of its democratic fixtures.

In contradiction to this grand mythology, Nelson provides us with a concise – although thorough – counter-narrative that expresses aspects to American historicity that run in opposition to the premises underlying the standard master-narrative. Central to her thesis is the recognition that the historical trends in American politics have not conformed to a trajectory headed toward an increasingly enhanced democratic embodiment. As Nelson quite correctly indicates, the practice of radical democracy and the cultural attributes with which it is associated – those behavioral habits that dispose the citizenry so that they take an active role in the ongoing affairs of government – had a more complete expression during the Colonial epoch than in subsequent periods of American history.

With the ratification of the Constitution and the establishment of a centralized office wielding executive powers, a trend was set in motion that is comparable to the political transformation undergone by the Roman Republic during the Roman Revolution. That is, similarly to the Roman Emperor, whose ascendancy to power was associated with popular land reform, the Presidency in American governance has been interpreted as a political mechanism offering representation to the populous. Presidentialism, as Nelson terms it – which is defined as the stature that has been infused into the semiology attached to the conception of the High Office – has been, from its inception, increasingly interpreted as a vehicle for the realization of the popular will in the body of public policy.

Even more, the concept of Presidency has acquired a semantic value, adding to the concept a latent notion of paternalism. We, as citizens, are all too willing to submit to this parental authority; not only during times of uncertainly, peril, and calamity, but during times unmarked by social drama, because we see him as the personification of the democracy that we collectively form as Americans. When the President appears powerful and impacting, we relish his strong paternal presence because we conflate it with our collective contributions, as citizens, to American polity.

However, it is precisely this quality that is assigned to the Presidency – an attribution that causes the Presidential incumbent to be perceived not simply as the outcome of democratic process, but as the carrier of the vitality belonging to the body politic – that contributes to the cultivation of behavioral dispositions, rendering the citizenry democratically disinclined. We confuse our ability to engage in a ritualized affair – where we cast a single vote that infinitesimally affects the outcome of a Presidential Election – with the operations of a functioning democracy. This illusion is propagated by the growing authoritarianism of the Presidency – which reinforces the prejudice that voting in Presidential Elections somehow epitomizes democratic civic engagement.

As Nelson adeptly points out, democracy is more than mere electoral politics. For a political order to be democratic, public policy must be determined through the direct deliberative participation of the citizenry. The Republican Romans, for instance, indeed had elected officials. Furthermore, the aristocrats in the Republic formed the Senate. Nevertheless, only through passage in the House of Plebes could legislation be enacted. Although the Republican Romans possessed intermediaries between the state and the public, such as the Senate who could advise and consent, the commoners, whose votes were organized according to tribes, remained politically empowered through their ability to directly legislate.

Democracy, in order for it to exist in America, must take on similar attributes to those instantiated by the Roman Republic. Americans must learn to acknowledge that the unilateralism of the Presidency is antithetical to democratic organization. Democracy is a messy affair; one that involves an ongoing public dialog conducted in an effort to arrive at new compromises among shifting factions. Democracy is not a political condition whereby a “Decider,” as Nelson mocks, is endowed with solitary authority over pertinent matters of state.

The Populist Party of America has already adopted a platform that calls for political decentralization, with the intention to effect a condition conducive to what we have coined, localized democracy. We realized that through the political empowerment of local communities – a state of affairs that can be hypothetically achieved through the decentralization of government – the political influence of individuals can be amplified; thus, accentuating the motivations of ordinary people to participate in the dealings of their municipal polities.

People will become more politically conscious and politically engaged because, within the context of municipal affairs, their participations can have demonstrable consequences upon the public policies that bare the closest immediacy to the Lifeworlds that they inhabit. In other words, the impact that can be had through participation of people in localized democracy will seem more concrete and more relevant and, therefore, more worthy of their sustained interests and their persisting efforts.

In the prescriptions she lays out for a democratic revival, Nelson appears to have unknowingly joined Populist America’s activist chorus. She recommends political decentralization. Even more, Nelson introduces the verbiage, leaderless democracy, in order to designate an organizational state that is comparable to the networked politics that I had summarized in earlier writings that examined a developing theory of democracy, which has been labeled by members of open source software communities as Extreme Democracy:

http://www.midwest-populistamerica.com/articles/theories-of-extreme-democracy/; http://www.extremedemocracy.com/.

Despite the lack of originality marking the recommendations included under the breadth of the normative section belonging to Nelson’s work, she does provide a valuable survey of the various trends in Computer Mediated Communications that are not only leading to a new paradigm of democratic organization, but to a larger intellectual phenomenon that should be considered a new episteme.

The emergence of social knowledge – facilitated through the device of web based communications – is generally characterized as decentralized modalities of content authoring and editing. Wiki platforms, such as the Wikipedia, are demonstrative of this understanding of knowledge and the processes through which knowledge is most effectively constructed. In the spaces generated by the Wikipedia, anybody can contribute to the creation of content by either authoring original materials or editing the materials already published on the platform.

Although there lacks a sufficient amount of studies to draw generalizations with certainty, preliminary studies, such as the one conducted by Nature, have compared the Wikipedia with traditional reference publications, such as Britannica, and have found the rates of errata between the two respective reference materials closer than one would probably suspect. Additionally, the Wikipedia, in comparison to Britannica, possesses a far greater amount of materials devoted to a broader range of topics. Further, due to its decentralized editing process, it takes less time for the Wikipedia to correct its errata than it does for publications, such as Britannica, that follow a traditional workflow process.

All of these developing social formations fall under the extension of the concept, Web 2.0: web platforms that are devoted to collaborative knowledge building conducted by a community of interlocutors. This new form of sociability suggests that radical democracy – a state that is, oftentimes, embodied by Web 2.0 communities – is not only a deontological ideal – a social condition that we should strive to foster, because it is inherently desirable – but a form of social organization that is pragmatically endowed.

In order to understand why social knowledge produces knowledge constructs on a scale that supersedes in volume and quality the knowledge built from traditional social institutions, such as the Academe, it is illuminative to first explore the precepts that support the epistemic prejudices associated with High Modernity and the Academe:

Political centralization, according to its interpretation under the lens of the new social knowledge understanding of knowledge, is a relic belonging to the social condition marked by industrial capitalism: a myriad of interdependent industrial productions that require homogeneity in order for there to be the predictability that is necessary for the various manufacturing outputs to be interoperable with one another. What is more, industrial capitalism calls for cultural uniformity, in order to effect a state wherein the activities of labor can be integrated into the system of interdependent industrial functions that collectively comprise the modes of production; a social organization that requires social agents, serving a labor, to react in predictable ways when operating as cogs in the machineries constituting the modes of production. Following this logic, organizations must possess an executive authority, under which all other offices and capacities are integrated, in order to ensure their synchrony. In short, they must all fall under a unified command structure.

The paradigm of centralized organization continues to reign dominant in contemporaneity. Nonetheless, this centralized model of social organization is not necessarily the most efficient or effective. Whether we are to compare a starfish to a spider; Native American Apaches to the Aztec or the Incas - decentralized structures are proving to be more resilient and adaptable.

Nelson refers to the popular work, The Starfish and the Spider, authored by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, who point out that leaderless organizations – similarly to the starfish and the Apaches – cannot be destroyed by annihilating a single component of their structures. Contrarily, in a case of spiders and in the case of the Native American empires, the organisms can be killed by simply targeting their central nervous systems – or, specifically in these cases, the head of the spider and the metropolises, belonging respectively to the Aztec and to the Inca.

The challenge for the reader is to understand how these properties, attributable to leaderless organizations, relate to potential democratic reforms enacted upon the American sociopolitical establishment. I would suggest that leaderless organizations – or, in the context of this essay’s ensuing sociopolitical considerations, what I shall call networked politics – possess a dual function:

Initially, networked politics can be used as an instrument of insurrection. The recent success of the popular uprising among the Filipino is evidentiary of the efficacy of networked forms of resistance. The insurgents relied upon a moblog – a server upon which contents derived from wireless gadgets can be published by a decentralized public – in order to coordinate their activities. Therefore, the Filipino revolution was not centralized, falling under a single command structure; rather, it was decentralized and voluntarily associational. Although networked politics have just now emerged as a topic of social scientific research, historical incidents, such as the historically recent Filipino revolution, suggest that they might be the optimal form of political resistance in a world where social actors are increasingly connected via the availability of Internet based forms of communication.

Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, networked politics are more resistant to the consolidation of sociopolitical power under any particular hegemony. If we look to traditional forms of popular insurrection – those that were guided and controlled, to a large measure, by van guards – we see a tendency for the elites, who orchestrated the successful revolution, to simply consolidate power themselves, forming another hegemonic faction in control of the society’s sociopolitical power.

As Orwell so brilliantly depicted in his Animal Farm, the revolutionary elites – which, in the case of Orwell’s short story, were comprised of the van guard pigs on the Farm – following the revolution, simply transform into the role that was assumed by the previous governing class. Consequently, the pigs, after staging the revolution, eventually morphed into an embodiment indistinguishable from the human farmer who had been expelled during the uprising.

However, in the case of network politics, there is no centralization, so there will not necessarily be any faction in a position to install an elitist governing structure, or hegemony, in the post-revolutionary social order. To translate the argument I am making into Nelson’s terms – the expressions she used when constructing an alternative American historicity – the emergent social condition will not possess a unified executive branch, and, therefore, it will be absent of Presidentialism: The cultural condition whereby Americans are disposed to conflate democratic processes with the presence of a strong, paternalistic Executive Authority.

Russell Cole

Tags: activism, constitution, decentralization, democracy, executive powers, government, populist party america, Russell Coles Blog, self governance, Social Change, sociology, sociology web 2.0
Categories: Commentary, Democracy, constitution, government, Russell Cole's Blog, Decentralization, self-governance, Social Change, Sociology, activism, executive powers
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Following the Larry Craig arrest for lurid conduct in a public restroom, I had posted a sympathetic letter, expressing pity for someone so tortured, self deluded, and sensually deprived.  I contended that this uncover operation executed by a police officer reflected more poorly upon those who conceive and implement such a law enforcement plan than those who fall victim to its ensnarement.

Certainly, the authoritarian mentality responsible for these contraventions into such consensual activities is more alarming – due to its reflection of authoritarian tendencies by those who wield power – than the prospect of people having sex in a restroom. Disregard for civil liberties can be a slippery slope.

The more commonplace these authoritarian incursions into our private affairs become, the more precedents are established for these government-sponsored regulatory interdictions.  The accumulation of previous instances will inevitably change the backdrop against which we interpret the boundaries between government and the private conduct of citizens.  Future affronts to our liberties will appear passé and a matter of course.  Consequently, they will fail to register in our civil libertarian sensibilities; therefore, the governmental intrusions will not incite our condemnation, and we will neglect to call for their repeal.

Additionally, on a more practical level, sting operations in which undercover officers are stationed in bathroom stalls, posing as willing bath house participants, seems excessive for even the pettiest of people to insist upon, and such expenditures of resources can certainly be better directed in support of law enforcement designed to curtail crimes that are perpetrated against victims, who are injured in the process.To allocate resources, while we are supposedly conducting a ‘war on terror,’ toward the enforcement of these ridiculous crimes against morality is a disciplinarian excess that we simply cannot afford.

From the summation above, I hope it is fairly evident that I made a point not to direct criticism or judgment upon Larry Craig.  I sought to demonstrate that the pressing concerns related to this matter centered around the disciplinarian mentalities possessed by those who feel justified in legislating both morality and aesthetics.

However – and tragically – the Senator failed to learn from his experiences as the victim of authoritarian pettiness. I am not referring to any lesson to be learned regarding the precariousness of having sex in public restrooms.  Rather, I am referencing the need for social tolerance and understanding, which one would have hoped Larry Craig to have realized through his embarrassing experiences.  Nonetheless, Craig has decided to sponsor the latest ‘defense of marriage,’ bill that has been presented by the demagogic Religious Right panderers in the Senate. It appears that Craig continues to delude himself into believing that he is ‘heterosexual,’ and that other people are even willing to entertain the prospect that he has not engaged in ‘extra-heterosexual,’ relationships with anonymous partners.

For my part, I have realized that hypocrites of the most profound order probably do not  deserve sympathy and tolerance.

Russell Cole

Tags: liberty, Russell Coles Blog, self governance, Social Change, social policies, social responsibility
Categories: Commentary, liberty, Russell Cole's Blog, self-governance, Social Change, social responsibility
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Insightful remarks on the nature of American politics and governance

“We’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.”

–Ramsey Clark

“Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy.”

–John Pierpont Morgan

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

–Thomas Jefferson

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour [endeavor] to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

–Abraham Lincoln

“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.”

–Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power.”

–Benito Mussolini

The compilation of quotations was derived from an email correspondence authored by Dennis Morrisseau: A Vermont politician, he was the first Republican to run for Congress on a platform that included the impeachment of both Bush and Chaney. His biography also includes an incident during the Vietnam War where he, when serving as an officer in the Military, as a protest to the war, refused to engage in combat, and was subsequently court marshaled.

I have included this brief biographic description because it evidences the differences existing among the various types of political conservatism and demonstrates that the two-dimensional framework used by the punditry to index political ideologies is woefully inadequate and, indeed, in some cases misrepresentative. There are undoubtedly a whole field of ideological commonalities to be discovered between and among all of us, irrespective of the Left/Right division we have been lulled into assuming to impose barriers between us.

Russell Cole

Tags: democracy, plutocracy, political ideology, politics, Russell Coles Blog
Categories: Commentary, Democracy, Russell Cole's Blog, Politics
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